Tuesday, July 10, 2018

To make its own special
contribution to the #MeToo movement the New York Times has published an article
encouraging women to text full frontal pictures of their genitalia. And to share them with others. You cannot
make this stuff up.

We ought to be promoting modesty.
We ought to be promoting respect for women’s achievements. We ought to respect
women for their minds, not their external genitalia.

Not the New York Times. It has
explained how and why a woman should overcome her
sense of shame and send out pictures of her genitals to some loving boyfriend
or husband.

The Time pretends that these
pictures will only be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s boudoir. It does not
understand that teenage girls are reading this stuff and that when they send
similar pictures to some boy they want to seduce, they do not understand that
the pictures will be distributed openly and freely in the locker room.

The Times is normalizing
shamelessness. It is assaulting female modesty. It is declaring this activity
to be just another loving gesture for a couple that wants to heat up its sex
life. This is beyond appalling. If you want to know why girls sext, the
answer is, the culture encourages it. If it does not encourage it, it condones
it.

If you were wondering why a
quarter of the teenage girls in America are cutting themselves or burning their
bodies, perhaps it has something to do with the feeling of being overexposed,
of having no privacy and no modesty and no intimacy. We have become a culture of voyeurs... and the victims are invariably women.

The Times presents it all as an
everyday occurrence, though one that ought not to be exposed to the children:

It was Thanksgiving, and Matt Silver was sitting
around a table with his family when his 24-year-old girlfriend texted. “It was
the first time we’d been apart,” he said. A full-frontal bare vulva popped up
on his screen; he fumbled and the phone landed faceup under his 10-year-old
cousin’s chair. (He retrieved the phone with his foot.)

Apparently, this exercise is
designed to enhance sexual desire. You have to wonder what people did to stoke
the flames of lust before the iPhone:

The
V-selfie, though very much here, is perhaps less insistent. Shared on dating
apps or in texts, it has been sent to create longing and a sense of intimacy: a
missive of lust and promise to lovers, or would-be lovers, who are separated.

And then, of course, the paper finds a pathetic fool who
rationalizes the action, making it a sign of commitment. No one seems to understand that once your beloved possess this image, he can easily share it… in what
might be called revenge porn. Even if he does not, a woman knows that he can do it, so the
threat is implicit:

He
describes her V-selfies as “bold, courageous, beautifying, radiant and
captivating when there’s a story and based on a conversation that led up to it.
It’s not just an image. It shows an element of trust.”

The new
intimacy, like everything else, is virtual. Wooing, connecting, arousing and
even cuckoldry is virtual.

You would think that these people might want to try
in-person “wooing.” And besides, who uses the word “wooing” to describe exposing or gazing at pornographic images?

And then, there are the aesthetics:

From
the awkward angle, purpled hue and identifying features, we realized Vivien had
missed the advice on lighting and how to take the perfect anonymous shot (it’s
all out there on Google) and included not only the beauty mark under her right
breast but also a pierced heart necklace.

Author Laren Stover seems to think that it’s about:

the
internet’s enabling of mass vagina gazing.

One understands that these pictures most often lack a face
shot. Thus, the possessor of the genitalia in question are not recognizable. Still,
doesn’t this suggest that the exercise represents a loss of face. And if this is supposed to promote pride, why don't women attach their faces to the images?

No story about such activities would be complete without
referring to Courbet’s notorious painting, The Origin of the World. Thus allows the Times
art critic to exclaim and explain that a woman who exposes her genitalia to
public view is proud of her sexuality. Huh. How stupid do you have to be to
confuse shamelessness with pride:

According
to Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of The New York Times, Courbet’s painting “identifies woman as proud
possessor, revealing the ultimate object of the male gaze with a forthrightness
that can stop the gaze in its tracks.”

And, don’t try to encourage a liberated woman to
keep her clothes on. She will happily flash the world and declare it to be art:

The
vulva has been occasionally flashed in real life as performance art. The artist
Deborah De Robertis exposed her genitals, glamorously framed by her
shimmering gold sequined dress, in front of Courbet’s painting at the Musée
d’Orsay in 2014 (the viewers applauded) and more recently bared her vulva in
front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, accompanying the display with a chant.

Stover is slightly discommoded here, because the images
shared over your iPhone lack a certain aesthetic appeal. Dare I mention, that a few
paragraphs ago she was suggesting that it was a grand erotic gesture.

The
smartphone has democratized and arguably cheapened, like so much else, this
particular form of expression.

In case you didn’t get the message, this shameless
exhibitionism is all about female genital pride:

Now
singing the praises of female genital pride is Regena Thomashauer in her book
“Pussy: A Reclamation.”

Again, it’s about the aesthetics or, should I say, the
cosmetics:

“We’re
in a generation full of people that want cosmetic improvements so they can
share images,” Dr. Frank said. “I think the feeling of one’s sexuality is very
much a center point of one’s image of themselves.” Intimate pictures have
become more common in courtship, he pointed out. “I think you and I are both a
generation out of that, but it appears that it is a major form of
communication.”

And naturally, it’s empowering. Because we know that when an
empowered woman meets a man she wants him to start thinking about how she looks
down there. She doesn't want him to stare longingly into her eyes. She wants to direct his gaze toward her crotch.

Therapists have weighed in on the problem, on the wrong side, of course.If a woman does not want to show off her genitals via text message, we can
always find a therapist who will pronounce her to be neurotic:

Not all
women feel empowered, and some are afraid to look at or experience their own
intimate feminine beauty. Nick, a 31-year-old software salesman and former
Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq and the Republic of Georgia, brought
up his girlfriend’s sexual inhibition to his PTSD therapist, who prescribed
they take V-selfies over a mirror.

“She
was very unsure of herself, very unconfident,” Nick said. “We didn’t have sex
very often. It wasn’t something she was super-comfortable with, but I was in
love with her. I was like, ‘O.K., well I guess I’ll find a way to make this no
longer an issue.’”

I would happily believe that this is a joke. Unfortunately,
it isn’t. Whether its news fit to print, is another story.

5 comments:

What at mess, seems inexplicable. Sexting seems disempowering as Stuart points out, the risk of sharing and later "revenge porn". I saw another article this morning, no sexting, but surprisingly defines "toxic femininity" as women who put too much out on display, wanting positive attention while reserving the right to victim status for unwanted attention.https://quillette.com/2018/07/09/on-toxic-femininity/----Young women have vast sexual power. Everyone who is being honest with themselves knows this: Women in their sexual prime who are anywhere near the beauty-norms for their culture have a kind of power that nobody else has. They are also all but certain to lack the wisdom to manage it. Toxic femininity is an abuse of that power, in which hotness is maximized, and victim status is then claimed when straight men don’t treat them as peers.---

Enter the TERF's! What if the "woman" taking the V-selfie actually has a penis!?Oh no there will be some oppression just around the corner, here it comes....wait for it.

I for one cannot wait for the left to finish consuming itself with intercene ideological warfare. Until then I can only imagine how many hollowed out husks of women and men will litter the landscape after they have defiled themselves in every possible way. I'm no saint but this is getting silly now.